Video of my farms and kitchens at work: The best thing you can do to reduce the time to cook food is to reduce the time it takes for the cooks to haul food back and forth. Kitchens need to be close to your food stockpile, and they also need to be close to the farms. Here is the basic setup for a max population colony. You'll see that for each kitchen there is a path to the stockpile and to the farm, that way if raw food is still lying out on the farm, they can go grab it from there. The distance between the ovens and the raw food is kept as small as possible. You'll also notice that there are no doors on the opposite sides of the kitchen. That prevents other colonists from running through the kitchen and creating a traffic jam. The beds are also there so that the workers can go to sleep and get back to work as quickly as possible. You'll also notice that is why the chapels are so close to the kitchen as well. This is the work crew schedule: I have them working limited shifts because my colony is so happy overall, they don't care. It boosts food production. Same with the farm crew: You'll notice that I have the kitchen staff set to sleep in the afternoons. That's to increase the likelihood that there are open beds closeby. That's also why I have the farmers set to sleep at night. I only give them one shift off, and they are still happy because I have so many other positive happiness modifiers in my colony. I actually don't even need to do that, since they overproduce so much food. They make so much, I don't even need a fully staffed farm crew.
Looking about just over 1/3rd of the colony on food production, almost entirely driven by nothing but wheat?
4 farms + 2 kitchens. 6 crews x 5 people = 30 workers or 30% of a 100 population colony. That actually leads to overproduction, though. You can get by with less by having each crew have only 4 workers. That would bring it down to 24%. Yep, just wheat and fishpeople and beetles.
Yeah, that too, but with this setup, you can easily cook 100 units of food a day, even with newbie chefs. If you build my efficient metalworks in the other guide I posted, it doesn't take very long at all to make all the materials necessary for 8 steam ovens.
I can't, for some reason, get those pictures to enlarge today. Ho humm. Naturally I have worked out that cutting the pathing down as much as possible to make things efficient should be the first thing to do, I have my kitchen with sufficient doors, in front of that a 3 deep food storage area and immediately behind that are my fields. My colony is still in its early stages, just getting a metal workshop built, so iron ovens are .... well I just had the first one done as soon as I could get a forge up (for pipes) since I found some iron bars in an airship wreck, but it'll take some time to get more. It just seems that my farming crews and my kitchen crews just really don't get humming, even though the farmers are out there all day long. The kitchen crew is rarely in evidence - I am not sure if they're goofing off or out in the forests looking for the baskets of funghi that nobody else would haul to the storage. There sure isn't a backlog of maize building up in the food storage. Once there is a harvest, it gets cooked straight away ... there just isn't anything much coming in. Yes, indeed, about 1/3 of the population is busy in the food chain, I've streamlined it as much as possible at this juncture, but it's creaking and wobbling. Things looked better when, for a short time, certain raw foods yielded multiple cooked foods (1 raw slab of meat = 3 meals, etc). Anyway, they'll turn our 'lectricity off for the day in a few, so I had better shut down the computer orderly.
Ok, now there's an interesting concept, beds in the kitchen. I have a couch and two armchairs in mine (8m x 4m) but having a bed in there has never occurred to me. Next game I'll have to see ...
It's something some have fallen into the habit of instinctively doing to optimise efficiency for some time now, the building quality system kind of discourages it but like most things, whilst it's only partially implemented, people just find out how to bypass the meaning behind new features and carry on as they were. But as it's far too easy to just spam flood decor that all gives a static +1 quality boost with no context or significance check behind the decor to make sure it makes sense to be there or isn't one of 1,001 rugs all stacked on top of each other to abuse the hell out of the half-implemented systems, it's still currently far too easy to just bypass any significance to the quality system for now but hopefully that'll get ironed out and the cheap hacky work arounds will get stomped on to address some of the bad habits that have established due to taking advantage of holes in half-implemented behaviours.
I always put two or three cots in each workshop. It just makes sense to me rather than trying to build a dozen bunkhouses to instead cram beds in buildings that are going to go up anyway.
